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To add to what @Peterw42 said, the common fee is stated in the bylaws, therefore changing the common fee = changing the bylaws, which need no less than half the total votes. The special assessment fee is just a regular AGM proposal, so all which is required is that co-owners receive sufficient information about this, no less than seven days before the AGM. Although one could question whether the AGM has the power to vote on “collecting money” from co-owners beyond what the Condo Act already specifies (that building expenses should be shared according to ownership ratio). But it seems to be tolerated, not explicitly disallowed, and sort of in the spirit of sharing building expenses.

The only real claim they could have is, if something you did has caused damage in the order of 6,000 baht. If it is a fine for just violating a rule, and this rule is not in the bylaws, they have no case, OTOH if the JPM is serious about not signing your certificate of no debt, it’ll probably cost you more than 6,000 baht to pursue this issue legally. Who actually issued the fine? JPM? Management? Committee? And very curious about how you can get a fine when you do not live in your condo. This is not about something you caused? E.g. letting pigeons or rats nest in the unit or something like that.

That is hilarious, driving around with your own fake motorcade ????

Is Shao the withheld surname? And probably more likely to be Chinese than Russian with that name…

Traditional banks as well, everything can be done online, including signing the new customer agreement. I think my last visit to a physical branch (to sign a document or similar) was around 15 years ago. Except of course for Thailand. A few weeks ago, I had signed up for K Biz (in a branch, with paper forms), but they got the last 4 digits of my phone number wrong, so could not send password during sign-up. Called customer support, they could confirm that four last digits were wrong and that they had my correct number as part of my customer profile, but to fix the typo, I had to visit a branch and fill out a form… To make matters worse, Kasikorn called me later in the day to tell me that the copy they had made of my passport was “bad”, so could I please return to the branch in order for them to make a new copy.

That is absolutely ridiculous. Do you want thousands of copies of your medical records stored on the internet for anyone to read? That is blockchain! And what problem does this solve? If it is that U.S. hospitals cannot exchange medical records between each other, then that is already solved in other countries, and blockchain is not really a solution, i.e. in its current form, it cannot do it, you would need to agree on a standard for medical records and then have all hospitals update their systems to conform to this standard and be able to read and write to a blockchain. If you do all this work, you might as well just create a proper system without a blockchain, so that medical records are not leaked into the public. Like a gift card? All this stuff can easily be done without blockchain. Edit: Also, local municipalities can’t just “print money”. Only central banks can “print money” but they take on liabilities when they do so. Most crypto proponents seems to not really understand our monetary system, which is why they think that new tokens can just be brought into the world with some value assigned to them, but unlike fiat currency, they are backed by nothing, so they should be worth nothing.

Somewhat ironic that OP brings up racism, and posters then pile on about how the teller was probably Thai Chinese and now even that they should “go back to China”. Talk about calling the kettle black… If people don’t like you in Thailand, it’s probably because you act like an entitled ргiсk, not because you are a foreigner.

Government shouldn’t have a monopoly on issuing digital tokens, though any issuer of such tokens should comply with the proper regulation, e.g. in the U.S. most of the ICOs / governance tokens are securities and thus covered by the securities act of 1933. Problem is that we have offshore bucket shops that are not subject to any regulation. Having governments participate in this mania does not eliminate the problem. Look at FTX.US or Binance.US, these were (somewhat) compliant exchanges, and yet, many US users would use a VPN to access “the real” exchange where they could do leveraged trades, or stake their coins with an expectation of 10-20% APY.

Not sure what “the existing system” refers to. There have been plenty of fines handed out to crypto promoters and actors, exchanges and “DeFi” companies have been banned from operating in many jurisdictions, etc. An exchange like Binance refuse to say where they are actually incorporated, and it is not allowed to operate in the U.S. (for that they have Binance.US, although there seems to be no real seperation between the two), so not really sure what more could be done regarding regulation here. Maybe more international cooperation? But there has always been a few countries where “everything goes”, and grey area stuff gonna gravitate toward these. One could though blame the 3 and 4 letter agencies for not having been pro-active on cracking down on all the obvious fraud in this space, but with half the congress being bought and paid for by crypto, it’s an uphill battle, and in general, the regulators tend to come in after it all collapses and then prosecute the bad actors, as if they come in too early, they may be blamed for “stifling innovation”. Just look at how eight congressmembers tried to stop the S.E.C.’s inquiry into FTX.

You sound like a real mature guy…

Yes, as cash bills are just IOUs, i.e. one dollar bill is an IOU from the Fed that is backed by assets (T-bills, mortgage-backed securities, etc.) So if we “pay them all back” there is no debt = no USD in circulation (in practice though, the Fed will have to “buy them back” by selling their assets). But it’s a little hard to imagine this, as money is credit, without a credit system, we’re back to bartering. For example when buying a house and getting a 30 year mortgage, what really happens is that some of the money, that we are expected to earn over the next 30 years, are given to us now (possibly by the Fed, by having them buy this mortgage), and we use that money to pay for the house, and pay it back once we actually earn the money. This does extend the money supply, because we effectively take future money and spend them now. In theory, the money supply will shrink again, as we pay down the mortgage. In practice though, population and productivity growth causes our money supply to grow. And then of course, economic policy like QE, but the latter is not given, where a constant money supply with a growing population will either make us poorer or lead to deflation.

A dollar bill is a liability for the Federal Reserve, and for each liability, there is a matching asset, which could be treasury bills, mortgage-backed securities, or foreign currency (reserves). It is correct that you can not go to the Fed and exchange your dollar bill for a small piece of gold, but there are still assets backing your dollar. You can question the “value” of it all, but this is where the U.S. economy comes in. The Federal Reserve will buy a treasury bill, let’s say for $1M. This effectively creates $1M, but the government now has a debt to the Fed of $1M, so for this new million to lose its backing, the U.S. government would have to default on their debt. How does the U.S. government ensure revenue to service their debt? They do so by having U.S. citizens and companies pay tax in USD. So the entire population can’t just decide, that the USD is worthless, because they still have to pay tax in USD. So the USD is backed by assets, and there is also demand for USD via products sold by U.S. companies (which eventually result in USD demand via taxation), not to mention that many commodities are also traded in USD, though that part could actually change, and likely would cause USD to lose some value, but Apple can’t sell iPhones in BTC and never exchange some of that revenue to USD, because they have to pay taxes.

The 42,037 baht deposited for 1,000 GBP was after fees. Their fee for GBP/THB is around 0.6% and a small flat fee (I think 31.70 baht) for “deposit into Thai bank account” and their exchange rate is pretty good. I’ve exchanged a few thousand euros over the last month, and my average “cost”, comparing with ECB’s rate for the day of each conversion, was just 0.06%, so effectively free.

Appreciate the follow-up, but do you mind elaborating on “must be picked up as cash”? I checked sending 1,000 GBP with Wise and it would result in 42,037. THB being deposited into a Thai bank account, where it sounds like W.U. gave your lady 37,715 THB in cash (for 1,000 GBP), that’s a difference 4,322 THB, which is quite a lot in Thailand. I am familiar with some remote villages where there are no banks or ATMs nearby, so sending money to people living there often happens through a middleman who will charge 15-20 baht per 1,000 baht sent (for delivering the cash). But if your lady can go to a W.U. office, I would imagine she is not in such remote place, and can also go to an ATM.

Sure, you can dream up some dystopia, but try actually read what the various working groups have said about the topic, and you will find that mostly they are puzzled as to why people keep bringing it up, as they see CBDCs as a solution in search of a problem. The most concrete “problem” I have seen described is the reliance on private money, which to some extend could be eliminated by giving people direct access to central banks’ balance sheets, but I am not sure how credit would work in such system, and I have a hard time seeing it as dystopian to try and reduce people’s reliance on banks.

It often seems like crypto proponents will give credibility to anyone who is bullish on crypto, despite their terrible track record or absurd statements. Cathie Wood is not that much different from Michael Saylor, who is also pretty “out there” but still brought on CNBC to talk up bitcoin, despite his current investment in the coin being down 45%.

I think you need to buy 45 of them for the dinner and they sold 45,000 in total, so that’s at most 1,000 people coming to dinner. He will probably do a gala dinner, so you will pay $4,455 to attend an event with 999 other people where Trump will ramble about how they stole the election. What a bargain…

That is what I did, and now I also checked Kraken + Bitkub: If I go by the stated fees, I get 0.20% on Kraken to buy USDC, 0.25% on Bitkub to sell USDC, and then 20 THB to withdraw from Bitkub (I assume depositing to Kraken is free, this will depend on your bank), and probably around $0.50 to transfer USDC on the Ethereum blockchain (but maybe you use a cheaper chain?) This all comes out to about $5.50, but if I then actually look at how many THB I get from selling USDC on Bitkub, it currently gives me 34.85 THB for each USDC where Wise will give me 35.06 THB for 1 USD. So with your method, I end up with around 34,658 THB (for sending $1,000), but Wise will give me 34,726 THB (this is sending $1,000 from U.S. bank account via ACH and deposit into Thai bank account). Sure, it’s only 68 baht more received with Wise, but it’s a lot easier and with your method, there are some unknowns, like the gas fee, and how liquid USDC is when you want to sell for THB. All in all, it does not appear that the crypto method has advantages over something like Wise. Though I must confess it is actually impressive that the crypto method, although not cheaper, is at least competitive with Wise, as the crypto method involves at least 3 parties that wants to get paid for their service (Kraken, Bitkub, and the miners).

But this is for sending money to Thailand, right (you said you deposited $1,000 on Kraken, converted to USDC and sent to Bitkub)? Because here I would actually have expected you could make a profit from people wanting to buy crypto coins with THB (and thus benefit from the small premium caused by Thailand’s currency controls). The OP wants to get money out of Thailand. For the records, Google currently reports that $1,000 = ฿34,890. If I send ฿34,890 with DeeMoney then the recipient will get $998, so a $2 fee.

Not that I really care about this tangent, but my first visit to Tokyo was in 2007, and one thing I did notice, was all the mask wearing. So much that I actually asked one of the locals, what was with the masks, and he told me, that there were different reasons, but one of them was if you were sick, you wore it to protect others from getting your infection.

If you followed the scientific community, you would have seen that many studies were done to assess the effectiveness of masks, and governments updated their guidelines based on these studies, although there were mixed conclusions, as initially we had so little data, and authorities would generally err on the side of caution, because one thing that should be indisputable is that the coronavirus was spreading fast, it was killing people in high numbers, and even perfectly healthy people got long-term effects from the virus, like diminished cognitive abilities, shortness of breath, etc. But once we had vaccines, and they were shown to be effective, that is when most countries (that used these vaccines) phased out the mask wearing requirements. As for Thailand, they were among the first countries to mask up, and unlike many Western countries, their healthcare system wasn’t overrun by sick people, so it did actually help them! They were slow to drop the restrictions again, the reason is probably manyfold, e.g. weaker healthcare system, initially using the Chinese vaccine (where they saw reinfections from vaccinated people after just 3-6 months), and general Thai bureaucracy. It always amazes me to see posts like yours, not only do you seem to be clueless about what actually happened over the last 2-3 years, but your idea that somehow the mask wearing was just a plot to have us all confirm, what exactly is the motive here? It makes absolutely zero sense for a “government” to flex their power by forcing us all to wear masks… And your “resistance group”, why don’t you pick an actual cause worth fighting? Like improving the traffic conditions in Thailand? That would actually be helpful, if we had some vigilantes like yourself, which would make a fuzz about the abysmal safety here.

I know someone who was an avid mask wearer. This was because her husband would likely not survive getting a covid infection. It was obvious that sometimes she did feel awkward being the only one with a mask, and maybe it wasn’t really that effective (it’s best if the one having covid is wearing the mask), but imagine she comes home and infects her husband, and he does not survive or get “long covid” — that is what made her keep on wearing the mask. Today though the situation is different because of the milder variations and most old people in the West have been double-boosted.

Isn’t there a 0.25% trading fee on bitkub? Isn’t many of the THB pairs trading at a slight premium because of Thailand’s currency controls? Also, CoinBase states that “there is a 1% fee to convert and withdraw your crypto to cash in addition to standard network fees”, so if you withdraw via CoinBase (in the U.S.), wouldn’t you then also have to pay this?

Problem with financially illiterate people is that they generally don’t keep proper records or calculate their APY, and just recall the times where they made a profit.

I signed up for K Biz last week. Unfortunately last four digits of my phone number (to which temporary password is sent) were wrong. I called customer support, they could confirm the wrong phone number, also that they had my correct phone number on file. But they told me that under no circumstances are phone support allowed to edit customer information, even though she verified my identity by asking for account number, ATM card number, and my last ATM withdrawal. Don’t know if this is new procedure since you did the change. Rather annoying, but I can sort of understand this policy, with the rise in social engineering. You don’t want to make customer service employees make the judgement call about when it is OK to update customer information.